Louis Hartz Strengths And Weaknesses

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Since the political development of America numerous political philosophers have tried to grasp what factors influenced the foundation of the United States. Political academics such as Louis Hartz, Gordon Wood and Rogers Smith all attempt to give their outlook on how contemporary America came to be. All three philosophers, Hartz, Wood and Smith, have varying strengths and weaknesses to their opinion of the forces that influenced the American founding fathers. However, it is Louis Hartz and Rogers Smith that most acutely describes the formation of the United States of America. Born in 1919, Louis Hartz was an American political theorist who studied the founding of The United States. Hartz most notable claim regarding America’s foundation …show more content…

Wood challenges Hartz assertion of the “liberal consensus” during the founding era of America. He believes that the republican tradition influenced the framers much more than the liberal. Republican tradition follows the idea that the greatest way to experience liberty is to succeed certain rights to the government for a greater good. This requires citizens to have a civic virtue, meaning to participate in politics from the local to national level. From this Wood’s concludes that classical republicanism fails in the 1780s allowing liberalism to become the dominant political theory within the United States. This however is not the case. The first set of laws of regarding a governing body in America was The Articles of Confederation. The Articles of Confederation had many issues, the foremost was that it lacked a weak central government which gave many rights away to states and individual citizens. This does not sound like the republican tradition Woods describes America to be founded upon. The framers where inherently scared of republican tradition in which would take rights away from individuals for the reason that they lived under the tyrannous reign of a monarch for their whole lives. Wood’s assertion that America was founded upon republican tradition over liberal I find completely

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